On Saturday, I received a forwarded email from an internet friend. It contained the text of a post by David Bresnahan on NewsWithViews.com entitled “Mr. President, I’m Headed to Mexico.” The premise of the essay is that President Bush should contact Mexico’s President Fox and let him know that this yahoo is headed over the border, without “all the legal stuff like visas [and] passports;” and Mr. Fox should ensure that our renegade letter-writer receives all the same five-star red-carpet treatment illegal Mexican immigrants get when they come to the US. Among other things, he would like:
> 1. Free medical care for my entire family…
>8. I will need a local Mexican driver's license so I can get easy access to government services…
> 10. In case one of the Mexican police officers does not get the memo from Pres. Fox to leave me alone, please be sure that all police officers speak English…
> 12. I would also like to have a nice job without paying any taxes, and don't enforce any labor laws or tax laws…
In this guy’s mind, people sneak over the border into the U.S. from Mexico so that they can get free medical care and government hand-outs. And to take advantage of the fact that we tell the police to “leave them alone.” And, oh, after they’re done soaking up all the great gimmes, maybe they’ll make a stab at a “nice job” as long as they don’t have to pay any taxes.
My first reaction was to sneer and dismiss this article as containing no more truth and demanding no more attention than anything else coming out of the mouth of the rightest of right-wing talk show hosts that clog the AM radio airwaves every day. But I’ve come to realize that otherwise reasonable people really do believe this stuff. Our country is full of closet xenophobes who are being outed by the immigration debate.
Over the weekend, I had a conversation with a relative whose political leanings generally tend slightly left of “head-in-the-sand.” She shocked me with an impassioned diatribe about how immigrants soak up the welfare and the free medical care, and bankrupt our schools by flooding them with their non-English-speaking kids. She herself is one of the working poor; her welfare ran out a long time ago, she barely gets enough food stamps to make it through the month for her family of three, and she knows what kind of great medical care she gets for free (not); so I don’t know how she figures that illegal Mexicans are enjoying benefits that even she does not get.
On a progressive talk show, I heard a guy who claimed to have been a life-long Democrat insist that illegal aliens are “a slap in the face to the middle class,” because they come here to steal union jobs from hard-working Americans. And since they are here illegally, they should be rounded up and “held accountable” for breaking the law. If we could just get rid of those Mexicans who are grabbing up all our jobs, there would miraculously be enough living-wage work for loyal “mom and apple pie” Americans, and all would be right with the world.
These pesky Mexicans! In the eyes of the white poor, they are here to soak up all of “their” government benefits. To the middle class, they’re hogging all of the “good” jobs. And they’re brown, and they’re noisy, and they have too many kids, and they room fifteen guys to a one-bedroom apartment and send all their money back to Mexico, and they refuse to learn our hallowed national language, and their music sucks, and on and on ad infinitum. It’s bigotry, folks. It’s “let’s blame all our problems on the guy with the slightly darker skin.”
The pervasive grudges that Americans nurse against Mexican immigrants are not, for the most part, based upon facts. It’s more an emotional response triggered by a very ancient human fear of being overrun by people not of one’s own clan. It’s an instinctive survival response…which you would think, by this stage of human development, our sizable brains would have figured a way to rise above. Until we can peel away the layers of reasonless fear and resentment wrapped around the real economic and legal issues of immigration, we will be hard put to come up with any intelligent, equitable policy.
